The Emmy Bum

The Emmy awards started in 1949, and are still going strong today. Unfortunately last night’s show was a complete bore-fest. The show actually started off really well with this year’s host Jimmy Fallon and a few members of the cast of Glee starting to round up a collection of actors walking around the studio to do a glee-like send up to Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. It was a lot of fun until they all actually hit the stage. Then it looked like something you could watch at Great Adventure while you’re waiting for your kids to stop throwing up from the last ride they went on. Jimmy Fallon might be funny at times, but he needs to realize that he cannot sing.

It’s too bad that the singing continued many times throughout the broadcast, including a musical montage devoted to all the shows that completed their runs, like Lost, and Law and Order. Fallon’s schtick was just an unfunny recycled bit from his late night show. Seriously? You couldn’t even think of something original for the emmys? We didn’t see the masturbating bear when Conan hosted. Fallon also tried to get some popular stars involved in the mix by getting some of them to do some ridiculous short duets to introduce each category of the evening.
The lone bright spot of the night was the Modern Family sketch that featured George Clooney. It was the only laugh out load moment of the whole show, and it’s totally worth you taking the time to look it up on You Tube.
Some of the winners included some surprises like Jim Parsons for one of my favorite shows The Big Bang Theory, Eric Stonestreet for Modern Family, and the most deserving person of the year Jane Lynch for Glee. Bryan Cranston won for the 3rd year in a row (and the 3rd season) of Breaking Bad, and a nice complaint was the victory of Cranston’s co-star Aaron Paul for supporting.

Mad Men won again for best drama, and Modern Family took won the prize for Best Comedy, and it really was the best comedy on television last year.
The surprise wins of the night were the best part of the Emmys, but all in all the whole show just felt like it was out of pace, slow, and completely boring. The writing was horrible, and the direction was noticeably off kilter. I say bring back Conan, and leave Jimmy to his night time gig. This year’s Emmy will defiantly not get an Emmy.

The Expenda Bum part II

One of the first screenbum postings was based on the trailer for a movie that I was very excited about. So even though I had to wait a few days before I got the chance to go see The Expendables, I was just as excited as the day I heard about it. The only problem was that I think I built it up so much that, even though I liked it, The Expendables wasn’t as awesome as I hoped it would be. I was looking for it to be my generation’s Dirty Dozen.

As long as there was fighting, shooting, and things blowing up the movie was awesome. Then unfortunately the guys had to act, and that was just brutal. The script didn’t help much either. All I could think about while watching it was that if it wasn’t for the all star cast this movie probably would have went straight to DVD.

Sylvester Stallone wrote, directed, and starred in the movie, and was smart enough to give second billing to one of today’s biggest action stars Jason Statham. Sly looked plastic, and the obvious coloring of his well groomed goatee was laughable, but Statham was charismatic as always. He is one of the things that actually holds the whole movie together.

Stallone plays the leader of a group of mercenaries that gets an offer for a big paying job to take out a corrupt general of a small South American country. Including Sly and Statham, the rest of the group is comprised of Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Randy Couture, and Terry Crews. Mickey Rourke plays their guy behind the scenes trying to get out of the game by sticking his ground as the intermediary between clients and the team. So Rourke sets up a meeting.

Sly goes to a church to talk about the job proposal, and meets with the only two action stars as big as he is. It was a really fun scene that Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t have to do, but because of their friendship with Stallone, and the realization of their roots, they were reportedly happy to be a part of this extravaganza of testosterone.

Stallone and Statham go to do some recon on the island nation and soon realize that they are not only up against a general and his army, but a rouge psychotic ex-CIA agent played by, the forever over acting, Eric Roberts, and his own mercenaries Stone Cold Steve Austin, and kick boxing star Gary Daniels.

During a recent interview Sly said that he had a sequel in mind, but the possibilities of the sequel would all be based upon the success of the first. The Expendables came in first place and made $35 million in its first weekend in the U.S., and is now up to $45 million domestically. The movies budget ran about $80 million total, & it will go past that in the states. I’m betting that the movie does a lot better abroad where they love cheesy action flicks. That being said it looks as if The Expendables will garner a serious return even before it’s release on DVD, and we all know that profits mean sequels.

I say leave your brain at home, enjoy the eye candy, and love it for what it is, but if you’re looking for more then that from The Expendables then you will be disappointed.

The Knocks Bum

This is the seventh season of one of my favorite shows on television. Hard Knocks gives you a rare in depth look at an NFL team’s training camp. In previous years they have peeked in on the Ravens (the year after they won the super bowl), as well as the Jaguars, Cheifs, and the Cowboys twice. Not since the first season (Ravens) has HBO had the opportunity to cover a team that has a legitimate shot at winning the super bowl.

The New York Jets and their gregarious head coach Rex Ryan are front and center, and as of the first episode they do not disappoint.

In the past the series has been reverted to teams that really had no personality or any shot at any success in any of their respective seasons. The Jets have both, personality and promise. A flashy young quarterback, a veteran pro bowl running back, the drama of their biggest star holding out, and plenty of other characters. However the best part of the whole three ring circus is head coach Rex Ryan.

Ryan is a member of an old school football family. His dad Buddy Ryan was instrumental in some of the best defenses in NFL history. The Jets defense that held the Colts to seven points in Super Bowl III, earned Buddy his first ring. He was also the defensive coordinator for the Vikings infamous “Purple People Eaters” of the 1970s, as well as, the defensive coordinator for what some consider being arguably the best NFL defense ever, the 1985 Chicago Bears. That’s where Buddy got his second ring. Buddy was always a tumultuous guy; he even got into a fist fight with Mike Ditka in ’85, at halftime of the Bears only loss of the season to the Dolphins. It looks as if Rex is an apple that hasn’t fallen far from the tree.

It’s great watching Ryan deal with his players and personnel, especially seeing how the whole organization is trying to help him stay on his well needed diet. He is fined every time he cheats.

This season will focus on some of the stars like Mark Sanchez, Jason Taylor, Bart Scott, Kris Jenkins (returning from injury), and of coarse the biggest question of all. Will Darrelle Revis report to training camp?

Then there are the players we never even know about. There are plenty of undrafted free agents that are battling for a spot on the team. It’s great to see them competing for their positions, but it’s heart breaking when you have to watch to coaches sit down the players down to explain why they are getting cut.

There are also the rookies that are thrown into a brand new world and seeing how they are learning all about how the NFL can be so much different then college ball.
Seeing all these athletes in this environment is a rare treat. For me it’s kind of like getting to go into the batcave. Before this type of show came about, training camp was pretty much a mystery for most of us. Now we get to see what an organization has to do to put together a solid foundation, and see if that groundwork can hold up all of the pressure of being winners and eventually champions.

The Memento Bum

After watching Inception (still the best movie of the summer), I had the urge to go back and see Christopher Nolan’s breakout feature film Memento, and boy am I glad I did. Memento came out 10 years ago, and I haven’t really sat down to enjoy it since then. I remembered I really liked its originality then, but now I know it is still in a class all its own.


Memento follows Leonard, played by Guy Pearce, as he hunts for the man that murdered his wife. However, the biggest problem he faces is himself. Leonard has a condition called Anterograde Amnesia which completely erases his short term memory. He wouldn’t remember things within minutes of it happening so he would have to keep his investigative notes in a most peculiar way.

Leonard would tattoo all of his most important findings all over his body, and add notes to Polaroid’s he takes of people, places and things to always keep himself as organized as possible. Leonard believed that it’s his experience as a former insurance investigator, & organizational skills that will continue to keep him on the track of the elusive man that took his wife from him.

Helping out Leonard in his quest is his questionable friend Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), and Natalie (Carrie Ann Moss) a waitress with problems all her own.
The thing about this movie that sets it apart from anything we’ve seen before it, and since, is that writer/director Nolan tries to put the film’s viewer into Leonard’s head by telling the story backwards, and a bit sideways, but never in chronological order. You might think that it is hard to keep a story suspenseful once you know the ending, but believe me the ending of the movie itself will still blow you away. It might even surprise you to know that the whole movie was shot in only 25 days.
There is a special edition DVD that has an easter egg that will allow you to watch the movie in chronological order, but unless you watch Memento a few times as Nolan originally intended it will ruin the genius and innovation that the whole film encompasses.
Everyone that saw Memento in 2000 had to know that Christopher Nolan’s opus was the beginning of new visionary’s world that would eventually bring us movies like The Dark Knight, The Prestige, and of coarse Inception.
If you have seen Memento before, well then watch it again, but if you’ve never seen it, you know what I’m going to say, especially if you are a fan of Nolan’s latest inception of original story telling in Hollywood.

The Shark Bum

In 1985 Discovery Channel premiered on cable television, soon after, the higher ups at the network needed to find a way to attract more viewers….and a phenomenon was created. For the last 23 years Shark Week has brought in over 20 million viewers each year, and has become a staple of summer television.
This years six features include Ultimate Air Jaws, which takes a look at the seal hunting tactics of the great white, and their propensity to fly out of the water to capture their elusive prey. The difference with this years air jaws show is the new and super slow motion camera shots at 2000 frames per second of this amazing feat.

There is also Into The Shark Bite where the documentarians risk life and limb to place a camera into the mouth of some of the world’s deadliest sharks, and Shark Attack Survival follows host Terry Schappert as he jumps into the water with the beasts to give us a first hand guide on how to escape a shark attack.
Two other documentaries focus on shark attack survivors, Day of Shark 3, and Shark Bite Beach give some first hand accounts, and recreations of some of the most dramatic stories you’ve ever heard.

The final new feature of the popular week is Shark Bites: Adventures in Shark Week. This takes shark week host Craig Ferguson off of his late night couch and throws him in the water. The show is a compilation of Ferguson’s experiences feeding sharks in the Bahamas, and some of the most exciting shark week moments over the last 23 years. It looks to be a great mixture of fear and funny.
Each year there are so many of us that get excited for this week of television. The mysteries of sharks have kept us riveted for years and continue to do so. There is so much that we still don’t know about these mystifying creatures, but that’s why we love this week of t.v. even more every year.

So many people have had a lot to say about this coveted time, but the best that I’ve ever heard came from comedian Tracy Morgan. Tracy says that “we should live every week like its Shark Week”. The features will repeat throughout the week so DVR them if you can, and live your week. Well said Tracy, well said.